"The project I was working on made me do a good number of elaborate landscapes together with Fred Tepper and even Kursad (Plecxus) Karatas, who participated for a little while. Those had to hold up to an insane resolution (10755 x 1080) and had to be viewable from almost all angles thanks to the outrageous and innovative venue it is for. But that's not the topic of this thread. What makes it interesting for the following is the fact that I got a lot of practice with large environments and designing them in the most efficient way possible, because of very tight circumstances for such a large enterprise. The whole thing was underwater for the most part, but now I decided to play around with something above water instead.

The real reason for this mini tutorial has been of a different nature. On of my best friends, Gary DeVore, is currently exploring set design within messiah and the workflow we developed for the above. The mini project he had chose involved the creation of pine trees, or needle trees for that matter. Although it's been a good idea to use the new hair in messiah I thought I could try an alternative for him to see how well that would work instead. It literally took 15 minutes to make this experiment and inspired me to make a bit of a larger set myself.

The hair, which has been done during last year, was something I didn't get to play with at all for the whole duration of the underwater project. By the time it was done, we already had worked out other ways to plant our ocean gardens, hehe. However, this mini experiment has been a fantastic opportunity for me to do my babysteps with what we have now, so I used the hair for grass (Oooh, the surprise)."

A video tutorial that walks you through the relationship between raytraced soft shadows and anti-aliasing in messiah 3.0. I create a very simple tree model in Wings so that you can follow along with your own geometry if you'd like. . . and then I walk you through how raytraced shadows work. There are some really cool new things in messiah 3.0 that allow you to eliminate a lot of artifacts without sacrificing render speed. Enjoy. :-)

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